Are you killing your iPhone 4 signal?

June 24, 2010

Transcript

[ Music ]
^M00:00:02
>> So, you have got a shiny new iPhone 4, do you? It turns out that holding your phone a certain way might actually kill your calls. I am Jessica Dolcourt from CNET and here is how you can murder your $200 or $300 wonder phone. Ever since people have been getting their hands on the iPhone 4 there have been reports flooding in that covering the black antenna seams with your hand can slowly suffocate data signal. We tested it ourselves over AT&T's 3G network on several iPhone 4s and we are able to consistently reproduced the results. The left antenna seems especially susceptible and after covering it up for about a minute we repeatedly saw signal dropped off one bar at a time on one of our iPhone 4s. Signal pops back into view after about 5 seconds. Our other test phone had stronger staying power and didn't always choke when we block the seam. What is interesting is that not every person we threw the problem could reproduce the results exactly the same way each time. Some people's hands seem to have the Mida's touch, while others appear to be all phones. In addition to your own personal chemistry, we also found that the problem is highly dependent on your reception to begin with. It was much easier to kill off the signal when it was already weak. And of course some individual handsets may be sturdier than others. What we do know is that using a rubber bumper like the one that Apple retails for about $30 should help resolve the problem. Apple has been pushing that item pretty heavily which makes us wonder if the issue was already detected in-house. For CNET, I am Jessica Dolcourt.